Life cicle assessment comparison between distillation and membrane system for bioethanol purification

Abstract

This study is going to compare two different ways for the bioethanol purification. Distillation is nowadays the technique used by industry, but recent studies have demonstrated that more than 60 % of the energy used for bioethanol production is due to the distillation. In order to find a more efficient technique to separate bioethanol from water, there has been developed several techniques; among them membrane system is the best situated because their low energy requirements. However, for the manufacture of the membrane several chemical products are used and this could create environmental impacts that have to be studied previous its implementation. The main objective of this study is to determine by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) which technique has lower environmental impacts. Related with this main objective it’s going to be studied the membrane synthesis process in detail. The membrane system used in this work is a hollow-fiber that consists in thousands of membranes with diameters of 0,1 mm inside a steel vessel. The membrane is silicalite-1 zeolite and its synthesis process is going to be studied to quantify materials and energy requirements.